The joint venture led by Vinci Construction Grands Projets and Bouygues Travaux Publics, and their Egyptian partners Orascom Construction and Arabco Contractors, has won the Phase 3 contract for Line 3 of the Cairo metro.
French President François Hollande attended the official signing ceremony yesterday with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The joint venture has been building the metro system for North Africa’s largest urban area since 1981.
The new $1.2bn (€1.1bn), 67-month contract covers civil engineering for Phase 3 of Line 3, including 17.7 km of new line and 15 stations (eight underground, five elevated and two at ground level).
The works will require construction of a new tunnel under the Nile. Once completed, Line 3 will increase the overall length of the Cairo metro system to 100 km and serve five million passengers daily.
Work will start in the residential and administrative parts of the capital, including Zamalek Island, and end in the city’s densely populated and highly urbanised northern and southern districts.
According to Vinci the project will generate about 5,000 jobs and offer business opportunities to French small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the previous phase of the project, handed over in 2014, the joint venture called on more than 600 French SMEs as suppliers and subcontractors.
Driven by economic and population growth, Cairo is now North Africa’s largest city, Vinci said. The urban area has 16 million inhabitants and a very high population density of 73,500 people per km2. Automobile traffic has become highly congested. The expansion of the Cairo metro will help to efficiently and effectively regulate traffic and substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
In addition, the joint venture is also working on Phase 4a of Line 3, which will extend the system towards the eastern part of the city. The contract was signed in February 2015 and handover is set for the end of 2018.
Image: A worker in the tunnel of Cairo’s Line 3 metro (Bouygues)
